Multimodal Interaction Group

Workshop on

Haptic Human-Computer Interaction

31st August to 1st
September, 2000

Senate Room

University of Glasgow

Glasgow, Scotland

The workshop has now taken place. We had around 75 participants from 10 different countries with attendees from both academia and industry. It was a great success - it brought together a really wide range of people from artists to psychologists and engineers to textiles specialists.

Aims and objectives of the workshop

Haptic devices allow users to feel their interfaces and interactions
and have the potential to radically change the way we use computers. We
will be able to use our powerful sense of touch as an alternative mechanism
to send and receive information in computer interfaces. Haptic technology
is now maturing and coming out of research laboratories and into real
products and applications. We can therefore begin to focus on its application
and general principles for its use rather than just the hardware and technology
itself. One important question is what should it be used for?

The aim of the workshop is to concentrate on interaction using haptic
devices. Haptic interaction is interaction related to the sense of touch
- this could be based on force-feedback or tactile devices. We want to
be as flexible as possible so we will accept work on any aspects of haptic
HCI. There are other conferences that discuss the hardware but so far
there has been little discussion of how haptics can be effectively used
to improve the usability of human-computer interactions.

What are haptics good for? What kind of information can be successfully
presented via touch? Do haptics actually improve efficiency, effectiveness
and satisfaction? Arbitrary combinations of information presented to different
senses have been shown to be ineffective. How should sight, hearing and
touch be combined in truly multimodal interfaces? We do not want to end
up with haptically-enhanced interfaces that are in fact harder to use
than standard ones - haptics may become just a gimmick for computer games,
rather than the key improvement in interaction technology that it should
be. It is therefore time to think about haptic human computer interaction.

The is currently no unified place to present research on general haptic
human-computer interaction and so one aim of this workshop is to provide
an infomation resource for those interested in the area.